Mazzze wins increased PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up tournament

Monday, 19 July 2010

Now that the World Series of Poker has closed its doors to all but nine players for another year, the Sunday tournaments on PokerStars are back in full swing – take, for example, the Sunday Warm-Up that saw a huge increase on last week’s 2,990 field as almost 4,000 players entered to create a prize pool of just under $800,000.

The final table was swiftly reduced to a pre-flop battle as the rising blinds took away any chance of post-flop play. Mazzze came to the final table as second in chips and swiftly picked up dominating hands to send his short-stacked opponents to the rail.

Though a deal tried to negotiate itself at six-handed play we were left wanting as the players couldn’t agree on the allocations. The same thing happened each time a player was lost.

Soon we reached heads-up between Mazzze holding a 3:2 chip lead over his opponent, the rudely-named jackmeplz69. Oh, no... he must just like making pairs of jacks and the hand 9-6. Of course.

The decisive hand of heads-up occurred when Mazzze had lost the chip lead but his QQ soon pulled it back when 36m chips went in the middle against jackmeplz69’s 66. The final hand was a tournament coinflip with Mazzze’s 88 staying ahead in a race against AQ.

Tuesday is the deadline for all working Americans to have submitted their income tax returns to the federal government and Juicy Stakes and Intertops Poker are set to mark this annual occasion by holding a special freeroll competition featuring a $1,000 top prize.

“We run a lot of higher stakes tournaments for our more hard-core players,” said Intertops’ poker manager. “But since our network is generally pretty soft, we created this series to give less competitive players a shot at winning.”